


i'm a fucking teenage tragedy

by theviolonist



Category: Music RPF
Genre: Character Study, F/F, Suicide, transgender character
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-08-27
Updated: 2013-08-27
Packaged: 2017-12-24 20:57:39
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, Underage
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,268
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/944570
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/theviolonist/pseuds/theviolonist
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>T. is a botched dye-job straight out the bottle and nails bitten to the bone; Carmen only tells lies, because the truth is so unfashionable.</p>
            </blockquote>





	i'm a fucking teenage tragedy

T. is a botched dye-job straight out the bottle and nails bitten to the bone; she sleeps until ten every morning and there's an old Bible on her nightstand, the pages dog-eared at Matthew 27:45. 

T. is fingers stuck far up her throat and a flood of pink birthday streamers. T. is aching feet and aching limbs and wide smiles she doesn't mean. T. signs her letters Electra Heart and carves empty hearts on the inside of her wrists.

T. is a length of rope away from suicide. She's doing so well, her mother says over scones and jasmine tea at her meetings on Sunday afternoon. She got early admittance to Yale, I couldn't be prouder. How exciting. 

♡

T. meets Carmen in LA, at an all-night supermarket in Soho. Everyone knows Carmen, who first appeared on television as everyone's favorite prepubescent rockstar; Carmen, who was splashed on the front page of the tabloids at fourteen kissing her publicist with tongue; Carmen, who collects DUIs and drug charges like others collect stamps. Everyone knows Carmen; those who don't hate her love her more than life itself. 

It's a textbook fucking love story, really: their hands brush over the chocolate and mint ice-cream, there, their eyes catch, T. swallows the million things that sizzle under her tongue. 

While they're choosing the vodka, Carmen's arm carelessly flung over T.'s shoulders, she asks, "How old are you?"

"Twenty-one," T. lies, but Carmen just laughs.

♡

"What do you think happens when we die?" T. asks, kissing the back of Carmen's knee. It's the sort of body you learn only where it's been altered, like an old statue chipped away by time: the subtle touch of botox in the forehead, those overly made-up eyes, the stitches of too-tight bras and the charred insides left behind by explosive diets.

Carmen frowns. "We die."

T. hums against her skin. It tastes good, like sugar and strawberries, like really good alcohol. Like freedom. "I don't think so," she says, her eyes shining sneakily, greedy where Carmen can't exactly see. "You see, I think we, you and me, I think we get to live forever."

Carmen's laugh is like lightning. She bites T.'s mouth open. "Yeah? You think so?"

"I do."

"Well," Carmen says, disappearing between T.'s splayed-open thighs, "it must be true then."

T.'s head butts back, she moans loud and unashamed; it rebounds against the mirror of Carmen's vanity, broken in a fit of inebriated rage. _Come alive._

♡

WHO IS THIS NEW SOCIALITE, yell the tabloids in an uproar. "Don't read that crap," Carmen says as she feeds her pet lover pieces of diluted fame, because what is love if not vicious cruelty wrapped in birthday paper?

♡

Carmen reads T.'s fortune in her scars. Carmen only tells lies, because the truth is so unfashionable. Carmen says a solid meal is Moët & Chandon lapped on a plate. Carmen kisses T. in her silk sheets with a shiny chin and dirty fingers. 

"Don't worry," says Carmen, as she pushes T.'s head under in the pool, until T.'s entire universe is made up of cerulean, her eyes stinging with chlorine, "you're not going to drown."

Carmen -- Carmen kisses like she's the one who's drowning. But shh, don't tell. Carmen thinks she's invulnerable.

♡

T.'s parents call asking for Carmen to return their prodigal daughter. But -- I've got her virginity and a gold-plated violin, says Carmen, what could she want more? And she hangs up. Mrs wrings her hands and Mr says she'll be back for Sunday dinner, have you never heard of a teenage crisis, dear? 

Meanwhile T. does coke in Carmen's bathroom, laughing at the claw-footed bathtub. 

♡

T. might or might not have been a boy at some point in her life. Carmen says to shut up about it, though, so people... shut up about it. The tabloids don't.

♡

Well, say Carmen's friends. Is Carmen-- is Carmen in love? Oh dear.

(If you prodded them a little, sobered them up, they would tell you this: Carmen can slay dragons, Carmen can make millions, but Carmen in love... you don't want to see it, darling. It's a fucking disaster.)

♡

Carmen pulls hair in bed, and always keeps her thighs open, and keens like a real-life pornstar; from between her legs T. says things like "You're a real heartbreaker, aren't you?" and Carmen doesn't want to answer so she reaches her hands, searching for the ecstasy, and T. is (twenty-one) sixteen and a half with too much rouge and she's never liked boys like that but it can't be love, it's too intoxicated and too nasty and altogether too much like a hangover, something you don't really recover from in the morning, something you don't remember that makes you do crazy, crazy things, something --

"Kiss me, you slut," Carmen orders, her eyes heavy-lidded; love or not, T. happily obliges.

♡

"Je tuerais pour toi," says Carmen in the salty ridge of T.'s throat just after she's made her come.

T. licks Carmen's fingers, purring like a lazy cat. "What does that mean?"

Carmen crawls up on her knees, climbs over her feline lover. They compliment each other, they really do: the washed-out teenage rockstar and the golden girl, with her cold blood and hungry canines. Carmen slaps T.'s wrists to the headboard, nips on her bottom lip. 

"It means," she whispers in her ear, "I'd kill for you."

T. gives a shrill chuckle, happy as if someone had tickled her. "Really? Oh, that's wonderful!"

She rolls on her stomach, her lips red and her eyes shining. Her wrists slide out of Carmen's hold like water, and she points her fingers, laughing. "Bang bang," she kisses the words on Carmen's collarbone. 

♡

Don't read the things they say about you. 

Don't listen. Don't look. Don't open your eyes in front of the camera, it makes you look vampiric. Don't lie. Lie. 

Don't say yes. Don't say no. Walk like you're worth-it. Talk like you think you're shit. Say things you don't believe, only things you really have faith in. 

Carmen applies the last coat of Dior Euphoria to her protegée's lips. "Smack your lips. Maybe I should've told you all that before, hm? Oh well."

The flashes erupt as soon as T. slips a high-heeled foot out of the car, the sea of lights she'd always dreamed of, tearing at her skin from all sides. Oh well indeed.

♡

T., née Edward Antonin Nelson, self-christened Electra Heart, hangs herself at sixteen two hundred and forty nine days. When they open her stomach for the autopsy, her intestines are a mess of chocolate, cocaine and red velvet cupcakes.

No one is pretty when they die, but T.'s face is all blue and contorted, like her neck didn't snap right away and she stayed there for a long while, suffocating. (Then again, she was never all that pretty, was she?)

♡

Carmen goes to the funeral with two black eyes hidden behind supersized sunglasses and a Vera Wang gown created especially for the occasion. She doesn't cry; "Let's forget about it," she says when she leaves the scene, her heels snapping unforgivingly on the gravel.

♡

If you were to dig your fingers into Carmen Moreno's purse while she's puking in the bushes, staining her pretty black veil, you would find: a tube of red lipstick, Dior Euphoria, a sachet of something that looks suspiciously like cocaine and a photograph of a skinny girl with empty eyes and a real smile. 

But you won't, will you? No one cares about Carmen anymore. She's so two-thousand and ten.


End file.
